By evolution and experience, animal visual processing has
adapted to the
statistics of our natural environment to maximize both speed
and metabolic efficiency. This has lead to complex visual systems with
striking regularities among many animal species in
terms of early
cortical and pre-cortical coding. It is critical to our understanding
that we establish the link between the guiding principles of
computational efficiency and this resulting neural code.
The primary approach I will take involves
studying the statistics of natural scenes to explain the response
properties of neurons in early visual cortex.